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then, he’d cut a thin slice of cheese from whatever round had been reduced to slivers and hand it to me. It wasn’t that he liked me—he wanted to impress Manya. Then he retired to his dark room in the rear to candle the eggs, making sure that not a single egg contained a blood spot.
    Since Bubby baked daily, it would have been prudent to buy a two-day supply of eggs and butter, but unthinkable for a woman European to the core. She counted on her food shopping as part of her social intercourse, to exchange news and gossip: what child had the pox, which woman had been widowed during the night, what Jewish gangster shot or arrested, what disease swept through the ghetto. On Saturdays, when she didn’t shop, Bubby groaned with restlessness, bereft, as if she had misplaced an object that she couldn’t find.
    We could hear her sighing with relief when Sunday morning arrived and the ghetto revitalized itself, people from all over the city surging through the streets, hunting for bargains, for excitement, the endless haggling over a few cents or a few dollars. Sundays on the Lower East Side offered drama as compelling as theater. And Manya was part of it. Shopping between Orchard and Essex streets evoked a European market fair. In the bitterest weather or the most humid, she went forth with her oilcloth shopping bags. The merchants would hail her: “Manya, Manya, you should go to the Yiddish Tayater on Second Avenue, Molly Picon in
Ah Be Zum Labin
, or
Der Alta Koenik,
oh did I cry, hub ich gevanyt, such three daughters, the oldest, a tyvil, mean to her tateh.”
    After the dairy store we went to Saperstein’s. It gave Manya extreme pleasure and me as well. Our mouths watered at the smell of the barrels of sour pickles, the sauerkraut, the red and green pickled tomatoes, at the vats of black olives. I loved the counter filled with lox, whitefish, sturgeon. Saperstein looked like a sturgeon, long, white, sharp-toothed. I marveled at the way he wielded his razor-sharp knife. Cutting a bit of translucent smoked sturgeon, you expected it to shred if you breathed on it.
    Manya achieved status as his sturgeon expert. She had grown up with sturgeon, a staple along the Black Sea, and she pronounced a sample too salty, too mealy from being packed in ice, too strong in flavor, or absolutely perfect. Saperstein, a purist, inevitably felt sad that his customers did not truly appreciate his top-of-the-line products. He communed with Bubby over a slice of sturgeon or belly lox as if having a religious moment.
    Even when bad weather kept customers away from our restaurant and we were low in cash, Bubby invested in a few slices of smoked sturgeon, not for her customers, but for our family. She could ignore lox, smoked whitefish, pickles or fresh herring, but she couldn’t do without the weekly treat of sturgeon. To prove that he was a sporting man who approved of her taste, Saperstein created a cone from white paper and dropped in some caviar, which he kept in a tin secreted in a hole under the counter—God forbid during a robbery, the thieves would never discover his hiding place. For Manya he saved his best maslinas, black wrinkled olives almost the size of small black plums, that she prized.
    Our last stop was Pollack’s bakery—Greenspan had long since retired—to buy one large rye, and one pumpernickel that I carried, unwrapped. We never kept bread for the next day, giving any remnants to beggars. Staples such as sugar, flour, barley, kasha, dried beans, my mother bought at the grocery store because she didn’t mind carrying those bulky items once a week.
    Plodding home, exhausted but exhilarated, we finally climbed the two flights of steps to our door. Always, before she sat down, Bubby took the breads from my hands and cut the pumpernickel European-style, the bread held to her chest and the knife flashing inward instead of away from her body. Two slices of bread cut, she would root in her shopping bags, famished for some of her